Accepting or Declining a Test Cycle

When you receive a test cycle invitation, you have the option to either Accept or Decline the project opportunity. If you accept the test cycle, you must view this as a binding decision and make every effort to participate in the specified timeline (furthermore, you must accept a test cycle to be able to report bugs and test cases). On the other hand, if you're not available for testing or perhaps you are not interested in a particular test cycle, you have the option to decline. For test cycles that you decline, you will no longer be able to view them in your Test Cycles list.

Occasionally, you will be invited to a test cycle with a status marked "Pending Activation." The purpose of these test cycles is to gauge interest and assemble members for the testing team. If you are invited to such test cycles, please remember to either accept or decline - if you accept the test cycle, you will receive another email notification when the test cycle activates, whereas if you decline, you will not receive further notifications from said Test Cycle. If the test cycle requires you to email a project manager to further qualify you for the project, go ahead and accept the test cycle (if there are no slots available to you on a Pending Activation, your rating will not be affected). For pending activation test cycles, please do not perform any testing until the test cycle is activated.

For convenience purposes, you may decline a test cycle directly via a link provided in the test cycle invitation email. You will be presented with the following choices:
Review: Clicking this option gives you the opportunity to log into the platform and review the test cycle, at which time you can then decide again whether to review or decline with greater detail.
Decline all test cycles for this product: Choosing this option will remove you from all future test cycles for this particular product. You may still receive invites from this particular customer, but the specific combination of product, customer, and platform will be blocked.
Decline for this test cycle only: A standard decline of this particular test cycle only, you will not be removed from future invites of any kind.

For accepting, however, you must sign in to the uTest platform to view the scope of the test cycle before committing to accept it. Our recommendation for all testers is to make a decision to either accept or decline every test cycle as soon as possible. This will allow our project managers to make the most appropriate decisions about tester allocation.

Accept or Decline to participate in a Test Cycle (click on image to Zoom In)

Once you review the test cycle and still decide to decline. You will be presented with 6 options, which you may choose any combination of. Most of them are self explanatory, but we want to highlight 3 of them which would benefit from some explanation.

No interest in this customer: choosing this will prevent you from getting invites to the this particular combination of customer/product/platform. You may still be offered invites from this customer in the future.
No interest in this product: You will no longer get invites for this customer/product, typically for any platform it is offered on. You may still be offered invites for this customer in the future.
Other: choosing this option will allow you to input your own specific reason.

FAQ: I cannot find the test cycle I was invited to, what happened?

• If the test cycle you were invited to was in a "Pending Activation" status, this means that the customer likely put a limit to the number of testers who can accept and participate in the test cycle. When that maximum has been reached, all other testers will not be able to view or participate.
• There is a chance that the test cycle has already closed (all test cycles close after a certain period of time). You may select the "Show closed test cycles" checkbox and click "Go" to search for the missing test cycle. If you find the test cycle, indeed the test cycle was once active and has since closed.
• Occasionally, a customer makes the mistake of activating a test cycle prematurely. As a result, testers may reach an error page after clicking on the link in their invitation email. When you come across such instances, please check on the uTest forums for updates. In particular, you may ask questions on the forums chat window (if the issue hasn't been addressed already).